Progressives and narcissists share an unpleasant trait: If you make a mistake, it proves that you and your ideas are inferior; if they make a mistake, it’s just a mistake. Your mistake is irremediable, because it’s intrinsic to who you are; their mistake is just one of those things, and can be either forcibly forgotten or lied about.

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I seem to be aging backwards. I was an extremely self-disciplined young person. If a task needed doing, I buckled down and did it. Now, I feel like a teenager. I’m in perpetual, albeit silent, rebellion against the responsibilities in my life. Because I’m an adult, I don’t openly rebel, but I do take the route of procrastination and passive-aggressive behavior.

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When a teenage girl says “I’ll be done in a sec,” resign yourself to a very long wait.

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My liberal Facebook friends are not just less informed about current events than my conservative Facebook friends, they’re less interested. All year long, my conservative friends post “content rich” material — newspaper articles, magazine articles, long blog posts — that provide facts and opinion about events in the political and economic scene. And all year long, my liberal friends put up posts about and pictures of themselves. Then, when an election rolls around, the liberals suddenly become very active, putting up clever, albeit vapid and still content-free, political posters lauding Democrats and maligning Republicans. The liberals, however, do not link to longer articles, which indicates either that they don’t read anything beyond posters or bumper stickers, or that they assume that no one else is capable of reading anything longer than a poster or bumper sticker.

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My mild dyslexia pops up whenever I type the word “bumper.” I always want to type it “pumber,” because the word “bumper,” more than any other, messes with my ability to distinguish “p” from “b”. If you ever see me write about a “pumber” sticker, you now know why.

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Thankfully, here in Marin, we don’t get hurricanes. Sometimes, though, we get some nice winter storms, complete with wind, torrential rain, and thunder & lightning. We’re having one now. I always feel a bit guilty that I enjoy this weather so much. I’m only able to enjoy it because (a) I have a sturdy home that shelters me from the storm and (b) I don’t have to drive long distances through the rain. Those facts give me the luxury to enjoy wild winter weather in Marin.

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The most torrential rains I ever experienced were in Texas and England. In both cases, the rain fell so hard that drivers had to pull off the road, because their windshields had become impenetrable. There were no individual drops of rain, just walls of water.